While struggling to care for his ailing and unruly father, the author finds an escape in his daily runs. Then, as the stress and the miles accumulate, he arrives at an entirely different place.

Last October, as I neared mile 23 of my first marathon, cruising along a rutted two-lane blacktop near the fishing village of Southwest Harbor, Maine, I might have expected to feel exhausted, relieved, exhilarated. Instead, I found myself running through a wave of sadness. I'd never run this long or this far, and until a few hours earlier, I had suffered terrible anxiety that attempting the feat was absurd. Indeed, my self-doubt had been more disabling than the predictable roster of migrating aches and pains I brought to the starting line. By mile 23, those fears were behind me. I was tired, of course, but I was pain-free, relaxed, having one of the great days of my life. The route, which wound around Mount Desert Island, home to Acadia National Park, had led me past pink granite hillsides awash in fall colors, and along the edge of the Atlantic, where the only sound was that of rough surf colliding with shoreline cliffs, and through villages that seemed to have dropped, intact, out of a Hawthorne tale. It felt as though I had landed in one of the most stunning places on the planet, and had been granted the privilege of making my way through on foot. The run had been so pleasurable, so fulfilling, that I was taken aback by the deep sadness, approaching grief, that joined me on my final stretch. All I knew was that I wanted to keep running. I was far from home and I wasn't yet ready to return.

ON REFLECTION, it occurred to me that months before it took me to Maine, my marathon began in a muddy field in Solon, Iowa. It was Mother's Day. My wife, Emily, and I had just finished the semester at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where we teach poetry, and were preparing to head back to our permanent home in Brooklyn. Before we did, though, it seemed crucial that our older son, Everett, who was three and a half, fulfill his dream of driving a tractor on a farm owned by friends of ours. On a warm and breezy afternoon, Emily and I sat on the side of a gravel lane with our younger son, Gideon, and watched Everett, on our friend's lap, clutching the steering wheel as the tractor inched through the bare field, turning up clods of dirt. Perched up high, Everett showed neither fear nor delight; rather, he stared intently, unblinkingly, at the expanse in front of him, as though he were seeing the world from a new and previously unimaginable vantage point.

My sister called from New York as we drove home. She had received word that our father had collapsed in the elevator of his apartment building, in Toronto, and was in an emergency room. My father, who was 81 but often seemed much younger, had a history of theatrical behavior and had roused us with false alarms before. It was true, though, that he took poor care of himself. He'd been diagnosed with diabetes five years earlier, but never monitored his blood sugar, took his medication irregularly, and had a child's sense of nutrition. Once, he had gone into diabetic shock, and was lucky to have been visiting a friend who called 911. Indeed, my sister and I had grown concerned that his increasingly erratic behavior—memory lapses, irrational outbursts, unkempt appearance—were a result of fluctuations in his blood sugar.
My father had always been unpredictable, tremendously intelligent, and painfully unhappy. He craved attention and relentlessly found fault with others. His temper could be terrifying, and he was just as likely to be overbearing, to the point of intimidation, as utterly remote. Yet his affection, when it was offered, was immensely gratifying. For years, my mother, my sister, and I were driven by a desire to please him. My mother was best at it. But she died when I was a teenager, and my father never recovered from her absence. When I went away to college, I fretted about how he'd feed himself and left batches of food in the refrigerator on my visits home. I worried about his finances, his health, and his emotional state. I came to dread our long phone calls, in which he would go on forlornly about how difficult it was to be alone. But I wanted to be the friend he seemed to need so badly. Whenever I returned home, I would envision having a beer with him, going for a road trip together, hanging out in a carefree way. It never happened. I would painstakingly plan our time together—making sure that a restaurant I took him to would not be too noisy, or too expensive, and that he would approve of the food and service. The smallest annoyance could ruin the evening for him, and usually did. It was not fun. When I started writing seriously, I would leave him some of my poems, hoping they would interest him, and find them sitting in the same pile on the dining table the next time I visited.

Gradually, I did what every child must: I moved on as best I could. By the time my father landed in the hospital last May, I had a young family of my own to care for. My father would have to begin looking after himself. Whatever it was that caused the current emergency, I hoped it would be a wake-up call for him.

I WOULDN'T CALL myself a runner. For years I associated running with the drudgery of gym class, and I grew up with a well-rehearsed scorn for jocks. Then in my mid-20s I took up hiking, Nordic skiing, and cycling. I was spending my days alone, reading and writing, and discovered in exercise a way to leave my desk and to think more deeply about my work. A dozen years ago, I moved to Brooklyn and started running in Prospect Park, just down the block. I cared nothing about speed, or mileage. I settled into a routine, taking a short or a long run, depending on my mood, out my front door and around the park. Short was four and a half miles. Long was two miles farther.

When I returned to Brooklyn from Iowa last spring, running took on a new dimension for me. My father was still in the hospital, and his welfare had started to consume my attention. My sister traveled to his bedside, and found him weak and highly distressed. She received various explanations about what had happened to him. He'd had a chemical imbalance in his blood, it seemed, which nearly caused kidney failure. Or perhaps he'd had a stroke. It might be his diabetes; it might be prostate cancer. No matter the cause, my sister reported that my father was being very disruptive—screaming at other patients to be quiet, refusing treatment, tearing out IV lines, demanding to return home. When I spoke to him on the phone, he wept that nothing was being done for him. "I'm being left here to die," he said.
I had no idea what to do. His doctors said his condition had stabilized and that his agitation was typical of older patients in acute care, who suffer delirium at high rates. As he recovered, one doctor suggested, so would his emotional and mental state. "I had a long conversation with your dad," this doctor told me. "He's got a great sense of humor. He's a charming, smart guy."

Other reports were less positive. He had behaved aggressively toward a nurse; security had been summoned; he was strapped to his bed; he was sedated. My sister got a call from a psychiatrist, who had evaluated my father, said he was suffering from dementia, and had prescribed an antipsychotic drug. A few weeks earlier, my father had been living independently—not thriving, but getting by. Now when I called his room, he sounded drugged and disoriented. "I want to go home," he pleaded. "Help me."

Does anything prepare a child, even one full grown, for such a moment? I knew what I would do, in an instant, if my sons turned to me for help. But I didn't know how to help my father.

I went to the park and ran. It felt good to sweat, to wear out my body and focus my mind. The maples were in full bloom, as were the tulip trees and the elms. For an hour, I was out of range of emergency phone calls. My father, his doctors, my sister, my wife, my kids—they'd all get along without me for an hour.

One day, toward the end of my run, as I was about to leave the park and head home, I paused. I turned back. I kept running.

IN EARLY JUNE, I flew up to Toronto. At the hospital, my father was thrilled to see me. "There's nothing wrong with me," he said. "I'm sorry to have worried you. I'm going home this afternoon."

That was not what his doctors said. They wouldn't discharge him to his own care and were waiting for a bed to open at a geriatric rehabilitation center. Meanwhile, he fluctuated between a state of benign confusion and one of rage. "I think this is one of those places where they shut people in and you never hear from them again," he whispered to me. "It's a death room."

I stayed a week and arranged for him to have prostate surgery. It appeared possible, one doctor told me, that recurrent urinary tract infections had been to blame for this entire episode. The operation was scheduled for eight in the morning. I arrived at the hospital at six. He was having a tantrum. He had not been permitted to eat since the night before and was demanding food. It was a struggle to calm him. He insisted he was in perfect health. I reminded him that he had nearly died. It seemed to make an impression on him, but only for a moment. "You don't know what you're talking about," he snapped at me. "You mean well, but you're collaborating with these bastards. For God's sake, get me something to eat. You're starving me."

At two in the afternoon, an orderly finally came for him. I accompanied the gurney to a hallway outside the operating room, and was told I could go no farther. I went to the hospital's coffee shop, and sat slumped in a corner. Twenty minutes later, I went back to his room to wait. A ring of doctors, nurses, and security guards were huddled outside the door. I could hear my father screaming. He had refused the procedure.WHEN I GOT BACK to Brooklyn, I had a hard time focusing on work. I felt I had failed my father. My days were passed fielding calls about him, trying to figure out how to get him out of the hospital. He was moved to a rehab center, but was deemed uncooperative and sent back to the hospital. Where would he go now? What would we do about his apartment? My sister and I took over his day-to-day finances—a mound of unpaid bills and disconnected services. How should we respond now that his welfare was apparently our responsibility? I could think of nothing else. I worried that my preoccupation was taking a toll on my wife.

So I ran. It seemed to be the only way I could extract myself from panic and collect my thoughts. I had no particular plan to build mileage or to train for anything. I just wanted to keep going. I would add another three-mile lap around the park to my usual run. One day the skies opened in a huge thunderstorm soon after I left home, and I kept running. Another time I tripped, bloodied myself, turned my ankle, and kept running. I started making eight miles, 10, 12. I didn't think about nutrition or fluid replacement, I didn't lift weights or stretch or do intervals. Sometimes I listened to Beethoven piano sonatas; sometimes I listened to nothing. I thought about being a father, and I thought about having a father. My father had had a hard life. He had spent his youth as a refugee in Europe, displaced by war. He and his immediate family had survived a forced labor camp; his extended family had been killed. He had often been poor. He immigrated to Canada in his 20s, speaking only a few words of English. It's impossible to say how I would have fared if I had gone through what he had. In his way, he'd always been fiercely protective of me. He did the best he could for me.

I WAS AWARE that running had become a respite. But it was more than that. I brought my father with me when I ran. I considered what he was enduring, and I forced myself to endure. I was glad to punish myself for being healthy, for being surrounded by people who cared about me, for being so unlike the father whom I could not rescue. It was beginning to dawn on me that he was slipping away from me, and that I would never know him in the way that I wanted. After one run, my wife asked me how far I had gone. I tallied my laps around the park and figured that I'd run 13 and a half miles. She pointed out that was longer than a half-marathon. "Why don't you try a marathon?" she said. It seemed, somehow, to be the obvious thing to do.

Late in June, I went back to Toronto. My father's surgery had been rescheduled, and this time it went successfully. He was also given a CAT scan of his brain. A doctor said that in the absence of visible damage from a stroke or tumor, it was likely that my father had Alzheimer's disease. It was a hard diagnosis to accept. My father could still discuss the past in rich detail. At times, he could still pontificate on economics and ancient history. When staff from a fancy retirement home came to the hospital to assess him for residency, he was himself—funny, flirtatious, argumentative, short-tempered. I was told he could move in by the weekend, that he had great prospects of regaining independence.
I was choked up when I accompanied my father through the hospital lobby on his discharge. Two months after leaving his apartment for the last time, it seemed he was finally moving forward, and I told myself that I had done what I could. He was alert and chipper on our long drive to the retirement home. When we arrived, I unpacked his bags, arranged family photos around his apartment, and wrote a series of notes with instructions on how he could get help if he needed it. The apartment was on a high floor and had a wonderful view of downtown Toronto, where he used to work, and Lake Ontario beyond that. A staff member approached me. "Go home now," she said. "We'll take care of him."

MY FATHER spent one night there. The next day, he ran from the building, saying that he was going home. When a staff member followed him, he bolted into the center of a busy street. He seemed dangerous. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital emergency room, and admitted into a locked psychiatric ward. My sister and I were asked to consent to his confinement. We did. At least he would be safe there.

It was a beautiful July back in Brooklyn. I liked to run in the evenings, as dusk approached. I wanted to train for my marathon alone, in my own disordered way. I wasn't even particularly committed to entering a formal marathon. I had a vision of running over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the West Side Highway, across the Hudson River to New Jersey, and beyond.

I knew, too, that a lot of novice marathoners are motivated by dedicating their efforts to ailing friends or relatives. For a while it had occurred to me that I was doing that, too—using my own marathon as a way of sharing in my father's long ordeal. Then, in the midst of one evening's run, as I was thinking about my wife and children—how grateful I was to them, how much I was learning from them about the possibility of living without a constant sense of crisis—I found myself changing course. My father was very sick, but his temper, his discomfort, his isolation from others, and his cries of mortal endangerment were not new. Nor was his need to draw those around him into an alliance with his suffering. Somehow, whether through luck or circumstance or a long exertion of will, my life was unfolding differently than his. Perhaps I had turned away from him. I wanted to believe he would have been glad for me. It occurred to me that I might no longer be running to get closer to my father, but rather to feel the distance between us.

I returned home after 18 miles.

THE ROUTE of the New York City Marathon passes a block from my apartment, and I've always enjoyed watching the elites dash by, followed by the hours-long six-lane crush of runners who, somewhere toward the middle of the pack, look something like me. By late September, of course, it was impossible to gain entrance to that race, and in any case it wasn't quite what I was looking for. It was too much of a party, too close to home. I browsed online and found the Mount Desert Island Marathon. It was a small race in a remote place, offering no prizes and no hype. My wife had grown up in Maine and was deeply attached to the landscape. Two weeks before the event, I signed up.

I knew I was supposed to take it easy in the last weeks before the run, so I used the break as an opportunity to make another trip to Toronto. After a month in the psychiatric unit, my father had stabilized enough to be moved to a supervised retirement home. Fancy places would no longer accept him, though, and my sister and I found him a spot in a small facility beside a highway. It barely seemed to matter to him where he was. He no longer spoke about going back to his old apartment. He didn't speak about much of anything. He ate his meals silently, staring down at his plate. I asked him questions about his past, and his answers were brief and cheerless. He would fidget, look around his room, and ask what city he was in. Every few minutes, he rose from his chair, paced to the end of the hallway, and turned back.
The night before I left, I told him I was planning to run a marathon. "It's how far? Are you crazy?" he said. "I'm worried. Why would you do this? I remember what it was to run, to get a stitch in the side."

Visiting my father always wore me out, and a few days after seeing him, as I made the long drive to Maine with my family, I felt out of shape, demoralized, and ready to turn back. It didn't help that the weather forecast called for a Nor'easter to hit the coast on race day, with predictions of high winds, frigid temperatures, and snow or heavy rain. The prerace instructions had warned of the hilliness of the course, and noted, "Our best advice is to treat this race as a 'mini-ultramarathon.'" The night before the run, I lay in bed sleepless, feeling foolish for insisting on this capricious, selfish, dangerous undertaking. I thought to myself: My father is right.

I DON'T KNOW why the day turned out as it did. The morning was overcast and cold, never rising above the low 30s, but it proved to be pleasant weather for a run; the anticipated storm would hold out until evening. Six hundred runners gathered at the starting line, on Main Street in Bar Harbor.

Within a mile, the small pack was dispersed along a country road. I was on my own, more or less. It felt like ages since I had been this relaxed. The sun had barely been up for an hour, and it was comforting to know I had only one thing to do for the rest of the day. I was in no rush, running a little slower than usual. The foliage was glorious. Here and there someone pulled a car over to the side of the road to watch the runners go by, blasting the stereo. Locals stood in their front yards with their children, beating spoons on pots and pans. As the route dropped down to a beach along Seal Harbor, I saw my wife and boys, bundled in hats and winter coats, and I darted across the road to greet them. At mile 15, as I ran along the windy banks of Somes Sound, I began to feel how artificial a limit 26.2 miles was, how little the race would change anything for me, how much the strenuous effort it represented was bound to continue. What is a marathon, anyway? For me, it was four hours and change spent among a group of complete strangers on a rugged, weather-beaten island, doing something hard and joyful and ambiguous in its meaning.

Later, back at my hotel, I called my father to remind him where I was. "I remember you mentioning something about a marathon," he said. "I'm glad you called. I was very concerned." I assured him everything had gone well. "Okay, I'm proud of you. But you have to promise me you'll never do this again."

I laughed, changed the subject, and said good night. My body was hurting. I was hurting. I wished that my father were not so far away. I wished this could have been a different day, the kind of day it could never have been. He and I could have taken our long run together through the woods, along the beach, past fishing boats and lighthouses. Age would have been no obstacle, nor would illness. We could have gone at whatever pace seemed right. We could have taken all day, or longer, talking, or in silence, resting when we needed rest. It would have been a good way to be together.